Aggregation for Sustainable Traceability in Smallholder Coffee Producers: Cases of Ethiopia

Ethiopia is the origin of coffee and home of genetic diversity to the coffea arabica species. The country is standing first in Africa and sixth in the world in coffee production (ICO 2018). Arabica coffee is the main cash crop, and has been the backbone of Ethiopian economy for so long time, even though its share is slowly decreasing with emerging of other sectors in the economy. Cost reductions, sustainability, value chain and quality improvement are now the major priorities in coffee production systems which substantially require huge efforts of various actors. On the other hand, the nature of production systems dominated by smallholder farmers in a conventional way kept the Ethiopian coffee far below the level it deserve indicating determinations to improve the entire value chain toward more conveniently reliable and value addition. As a result, smallholder farmers at micro level and the country by large have been losing possible premiums and price margins supposed to be gained by sustainably traceable coffee supply. Eventually, unless smallholder famers could aggregate their products in the cooperative/union framework it will be probably less promising for them to add values and thus improve their wellbeing just only by sticking to the traditional cycles of producing coffee and supplying to collectors or local traders.